Excitement

There is much excitement here at Ania M HQ. Not only is birthday season coming up, (we each have our own month month, starting with DH in March and ending with me in June), but LOTS of projects are starting to come together and creative ideas are flying around like a cloud of bats. (Yes, that is the collective term.)

This year is a big one for myself and DH as we’re both *cough*-ty. The difficulty when you get to this advanced and doddering age is that you have acquired most of what you need and it becomes harder to think of something you might want that you don’t already have.

I have managed to come up with something! 😀

DD has shown something of an interest in photography, taking all the credit as the model for DS winning a photography competition. She asked for a camera for her birthday (April). Cue lots of research (on my part) on a suitable compact camera that would give her a decent result for a reasonable price…oh, and preferably a purple one (her criterion). A suitable model was duly found – Sony Cybershot W830, in purple – and purchased (to take advantage of an offer). In between pestering us relentlessly about getting her pressie early, which she will anyway as our holiday in Cornwall is the week before her birthday, she has been using my compact to practise and has taken some pretty good pics of the dog 🙂

All this rather got me thinking that maybe it was time to upgrade my camera, which is now a good few years old, although still very good, as snappy cameras go. But, since I have a photographic project in mind, it seemed like a good reason to look into upgrades. So, having done even more extensive research, I managed to narrow down the overwhelmingly vast field and identify one that ticks all the right boxes, and then some I didn’t even know I had. It not only sings and dances, but can do a trapeze act while doing a spot of lion taming on the side! DH is getting it for me for my birthday, though I’m rather hoping I won’t have to wait that long, as I’m jiggling about like an over-excited 5-year-old at the prospect 😀

As for said project, the ideas have suddenly started started exploding in my head like popcorn, to the extent that I got up at 5am the other morning to note them down before I forgot! And, I’m wasting far too much time reading specs and looking at accessories and add-ons for the camera.

Don’t worry, you will get the full low-down, in all the gory, Technicolor detail, of both the camera and the project in due course. Watch this space!

In other news, DD has finally got her act together and is making more rag dolls, which is a relief as the trading season is fast approaching. It didn’t hurt at all that I received an invitation to trade at an event yesterday where the organisers said that she loves all my bits, “but particularly the rag dolls”. I duly passed this on and got a beaming smile and much pestering to attend the event in response 😀 Come to think of it, I could probably do with turning my attentions to making some more stock too, though I have a couple of commissions to finish first.

Then there is the next Tarot Blog Hop, which I will be wrangling, so I’ll have to come up with something good for that, as it’s my theme, right? Plenty of things popping there too though, so the challenge there may be keeping it concise 😀

Meanwhile, on the leisure crafty front, I’m trying to persuade my Eviller Twin to join me in a shawl KAL challenge. The challenge part is that the pattern is in Japanese. On the plus side, it is all charted. On the minus side, the chart symbols are almost all different to the standard Western ones. However, I have managed to mostly work out what is going on and I know a very nice Japanese lady, who has kindly agreed to take a look at the pattern for me and confirm that I’ve understood it correctly 🙂

If you’d like to join in… 😈